In an already swamped Sydney, a disastrous weather system looms, making the search to find a missing child urgent.

Above an already swamped Sydney, a disastrous weather system looms. The city is not repaired from one storm before the next hits. There is enormous distrust of the civil service, including police.

Redfern is now a swampland. Anyone who has the financial means or the property to, sells up and heads to the Blue Mountains and beyond, or better yet, New Zealand.

Sydney is full of climate refugees from Asia and the Pacific, and from the east coast of Australia. Food and water insecurity have created tension. There is poverty, suspicion and cultural disharmony. A world of have and have nots.

Developers raise most of their money here from building detention camps. But how closely are those builds monitored? After all the 1% aren’t going to be living there.

In this environment a 5 year old girl from the Floodline, Casey, disappears.

Then the body of an auditor from the development company is found burnt in a car on the site – a proposed detention camp – where Casey disappeared. Are they related?

Detective Sadiya Azad is one of the displaced. Born in Bangladesh, she grew up in Sydney after much of Bangladesh was lost to the rising ocean.

As the next cyclone, bigger than the last, approaches Azad and her partner, Findlay fight the clock, the apathy of the police force, and the suspicion of the residents of the floodline to locate Casey.

Moving from the inundated streets and crumbling buildings of the Floodline to the refugee camps on the outskirts of the city and the elegant, air-conditioned homes of the wealthy, Landfall is both a crime thriller and a terrifying vision of the future that is bearing down on us.

James Bradley is a writer and critic. His books include the novels Wrack, The Deep Field, The Resurrectionist, Clade and Ghost Species, a book of poetry, Paper Nautilus, and The Penguin Book of the Ocean. His essays and articles have appeared in The Monthly, The Guardian, Sydney Review of Books, Griffith Review, Meanjin, the Weekend Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald. In 2012 he won the Pascall Prize for Australia’s Critic of the Year, and he has been shortlisted twice for the Bragg Prize for Science Writing and nominated for a Walkley Award. He lives in Sydney.